Bonger and Early Marxist Criminology examines Willem Bonger’s Criminality and Economic Conditions (1916), the first systematic, book-length application of Marxist political economy to the specific explanation of crime, tracing how Bonger translated Marx’s general concepts of class, capitalist competition, and ideology into a detailed empirical and theoretical account of why capitalist societies generate more crime than the precapitalist and prospective socialist societies he compared them against. This article situates Bonger’s pioneering synthesis between Marx’s own scattered, non-systematic writings on crime, examined in Karl Marx and the Conflict Perspective, and the more fully developed mid-to-late twentieth-century Marxist criminology his work anticipated.
Bonger and Early Marxist Criminology addresses a figure whose historical significance within conflict criminology considerably exceeds his contemporary name recognition relative to later theorists including Quinney and Chambliss, examined elsewhere in this silo, despite Bonger having produced the first genuinely systematic criminological treatise operating explicitly within a Marxist framework, decades before Marxist criminology’s more widely cited mid-century revival. This article traces Bonger’s specific theoretical contributions, his concept of capitalist egoism, his cross-national and historical comparative method, and his early attention to differential criminal justice treatment across social classes, each of which anticipated themes later Marxist criminologists would develop further using considerably more sophisticated empirical methods than were available in Bonger’s own early twentieth-century context.
This article should be read alongside Karl Marx and the Conflict Perspective, which examines the broader theoretical foundation Bonger drew upon, and Power, Class, and Criminal Law, which examines the systematic contemporary claims about class and criminal law that Bonger’s early work anticipated in less fully developed form.
Bonger’s Theoretical Framework
Capitalism, Competition, and Egoism
Bonger’s central theoretical claim held that capitalism’s competitive economic structure cultivates what he termed “egoism,” a heightened, socially destructive orientation toward individual self-interest at the expense of collective social solidarity, an orientation Bonger argued was actively produced by capitalist economic relations rather than reflecting any fixed feature of human nature (Bonger, 1916/1969). This egoism concept extended Marx’s structural analysis of capitalist competition into an explicitly psychological and moral register, proposing a specific mechanism, the cultivation of egoistic rather than altruistic orientation, through which capitalism’s economic structure translated into heightened criminality across the social classes it encompassed.
Bonger distinguished this structurally produced egoism from individual moral failing, arguing that capitalism’s competitive pressures affected the moral orientation of capitalists and workers alike, though in different ways and with different criminal consequences, capitalists’ egoism manifesting substantially in fraud, exploitation, and white-collar offending, while workers’ circumstances, shaped by poverty and economic insecurity, generated a different, more visible pattern of property and violent crime. This class-differentiated account of how a common structural cause, capitalist competition, produces different criminal manifestations across different class positions anticipated the more systematic contemporary treatment of class-differentiated offending patterns examined in Conflict Theory and White-Collar Crime and Conflict Theory and Street Crime.
Bonger’s egoism concept drew directly on Marx’s own analysis of capitalist competition, discussed in Karl Marx and the Conflict Perspective, extending Marx’s structural account of how capitalist relations of production generate systemic antagonism between classes into an explicitly individual-level psychological claim about how those same structural relations shape the moral character and behavioral tendencies of the individuals living within them, a move from structural to psychological analysis that gave Bonger’s framework a distinctive explanatory ambition bridging macro-level economic structure and micro-level individual criminal behavior more directly than Marx’s own writings had attempted.
Comparative and Historical Method
Bonger supported his theoretical claims through an unusually ambitious comparative method for his period, examining crime statistics and criminal justice practices across multiple European nations and historical periods, and arguing that societies with less developed capitalist economic relations, including some precapitalist and early transitional economies, exhibited different, generally less individualistic and less crime-generating social relations than fully developed capitalist societies. This comparative approach, while limited by the crime statistics and cross-national data available in the early twentieth century, represented a genuine methodological advance over Marx’s own largely non-empirical scattered comments on crime, giving Bonger’s Marxist criminology an empirical ambition that would not be fully matched again until the more statistically sophisticated Marxist criminology of the 1970s and beyond.
Differential Criminal Justice Treatment
Class Bias in Definition and Enforcement
Bonger argued extensively that criminal law’s definitions and enforcement patterns reflected systematic class bias, with behaviors characteristic of poverty and economic desperation subject to more extensive formal criminalization and more vigorous enforcement than economically comparable or more harmful behaviors characteristic of the propertied classes, a claim anticipating the contemporary comparative treatment of street crime and white-collar crime examined in Conflict Theory and White-Collar Crime. Bonger supported this claim with detailed comparative analysis of criminal statute books and sentencing patterns across the European nations he studied, providing an early empirical foundation for what later Marxist criminologists would develop into a more systematic theory of differential criminalization.
Anticipating the Social Reality of Crime
Bonger’s attention to how criminal law’s content itself, not merely its enforcement, reflected class interest anticipated Quinney’s (1970) later, more fully developed concept of the “social reality of crime,” examined in Quinney’s Social Reality of Crime, which similarly emphasized that crime is not a fixed, objective category but a social and legal construction shaped by the interests of those with power to define and enforce criminal law. Bonger’s earlier formulation lacked the fully developed constructionist theoretical apparatus Quinney would later bring to this claim, but established the empirical and comparative groundwork upon which that later theoretical elaboration would build.
Legacy in Contemporary Marxist Criminology
Rediscovery During the 1970s Revival
Bonger’s work experienced a significant scholarly rediscovery during the Marxist criminology revival of the late 1960s and 1970s, when theorists including Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973), examined throughout this silo, explicitly credited Bonger as Marxist criminology’s genuine founding figure, situating their own contemporary theoretical projects as continuing and updating, rather than originating, a tradition of systematic Marxist criminological analysis Bonger had established more than half a century earlier. This explicit historical crediting helped restore Bonger’s place within the criminological canon after decades of relative mid-century neglect, though his specific empirical claims and methods, reflecting the statistical resources available in his own early twentieth-century context, were substantially superseded by the more methodologically sophisticated empirical work these later theorists and their successors would conduct.
Bonger’s Continuing Relevance to Comparative Criminology
Bonger’s comparative, cross-national method, though methodologically dated by contemporary standards, established an enduring template for later comparative criminology examining how differing national economic and political systems produce differing crime rates and criminal justice practices, a comparative tradition extending well beyond specifically Marxist criminology into the broader field of comparative criminal justice research. Contemporary researchers examining cross-national variation in incarceration rates, criminal justice severity, and welfare-state generosity’s relationship to crime rates continue to draw, whether explicitly or through inherited methodological convention, on the comparative approach Bonger pioneered in his original 1916 treatise, a continuity that underscores his position as a genuine methodological innovator within criminology’s broader historical development, independent of the specific substantive conclusions his particular economic theory of crime reached.
Vold’s (1958) own survey of criminological theory, examined in detail in Vold’s Group Conflict Theory, explicitly acknowledged Bonger’s foundational role in establishing crime’s relationship to social and economic structure as a legitimate subject of systematic criminological inquiry, situating Bonger’s early economic determinism as an important, if theoretically distinct, precursor to Vold’s own subsequent group conflict framework, which would substitute a pluralistic account of competing social groups for Bonger’s more strictly binary class-based analysis, a theoretical divergence examined in detail in the following article of this silo.
Bonger’s Engagement with Contemporary Criminology
Responding to Lombrosian Positivism
Bonger developed his economic theory of crime substantially in direct opposition to the biological positivism dominant in criminology at the time he wrote, particularly Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal,” which attributed criminal behavior to inherited biological atavism rather than to social or economic conditions (Lombroso, 1876/2006). Bonger’s Criminality and Economic Conditions devoted considerable attention to directly refuting Lombroso’s biological claims using the same comparative statistical method he employed to support his own economic theory, arguing that the geographic and class-based distribution of crime rates tracked economic conditions far more closely than any plausible distribution of inherited biological criminality could explain, a methodological approach connecting Bonger’s economic criminology to the broader early twentieth-century sociological critique of biological positivism.
This direct engagement with Lombrosian theory positioned Bonger’s work as part of a broader early twentieth-century sociological turn in criminology away from purely biological explanation, a turn Bonger’s economic framework contributed to substantially even though his own specifically Marxist theoretical commitments remained considerably more radical than the mainstream sociological criminology, including the Chicago School social disorganization tradition associated with Shaw and McKay (1942), that would come to dominate American criminology in the following decades. Where the Chicago School attributed neighborhood crime concentration to disorganized community social structure without directly implicating capitalism’s class relations as the underlying cause, Bonger’s explicitly Marxist framework insisted on tracing social disorganization itself back to capitalism’s fundamental competitive and exploitative economic logic, a more structurally radical claim than the Chicago School tradition’s comparatively reform-oriented, less systemically critical account of the same urban crime patterns.
Bonger on Race and Crime
Bonger also addressed the relationship between race and crime directly, arguing, consistent with his broader economic framework, that observed racial differences in crime statistics reflected the differential economic and social conditions different racial groups experienced under colonial and post-slavery social orders rather than any inherent racial predisposition toward criminality, a position that placed him among the more progressive criminological voices on race for his historical period, though his specific empirical treatment of race relied on the limited and often methodologically weak comparative statistics available to early twentieth-century researchers. This economic, rather than biological or cultural, account of racial crime disparities anticipated, in preliminary form, the more systematically developed contemporary treatment of race and criminal justice examined in Conflict Theory and Race.
Bonger’s Reception and Historical Position
Initial Reception and Subsequent Neglect
Bonger’s work received considerable initial attention following its 1916 Dutch publication and subsequent English translation, but suffered relative neglect within mainstream Anglo-American criminology for several decades thereafter, a neglect several historians of criminology have attributed to the broader marginalization of explicitly Marxist theoretical frameworks within American academic criminology during the mid-twentieth century Cold War period, when association with Marxist theory carried significant professional and political risk for American academics. This neglect meant that Bonger’s pioneering systematic contribution was substantially rediscovered and reintegrated into mainstream criminological discourse only during the Marxist criminology revival of the late 1960s and 1970s, examined throughout this silo’s subsequent articles, decades after its original publication.
Bonger’s Death and Legacy
Bonger’s death by suicide in 1940, in the context of the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, where Bonger, as a prominent socialist intellectual, faced likely persecution, added a somber historical coda to his intellectual legacy, one that some subsequent commentators have noted lends a particular poignancy to his lifelong theoretical concern with how oppressive social and political structures generate both crime and, in extreme circumstances, violence against those structures’ own critics and opponents. Van Bemmelen’s (1960) biographical essay on Bonger, included in an early collection of criminological pioneers, documented how Bonger’s academic career, spent substantially at the University of Amsterdam, combined his theoretical work with sustained practical involvement in Dutch socialist politics and penal reform advocacy, a combination of scholarly and activist commitment that later Marxist criminologists, examined throughout this silo, would frequently echo in their own professional trajectories.
Table 1. Bonger’s Core Concepts and Later Theoretical Developments
| Bonger’s Concept | Original Formulation | Later Development | Developed By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capitalist egoism | Competition cultivates self-interest over solidarity | Class-differentiated offending patterns | Multiple, contemporary theorists |
| Comparative crime statistics | Cross-national European comparison | Systematic cross-national criminology | Chambliss and successors |
| Class bias in law’s content | Comparative statute book analysis | Social reality of crime | Quinney |
| Differential enforcement | Comparative sentencing analysis | White-collar crime theory | Sutherland and successors |
Table 2. Bonger Compared to Marx’s Own Scattered Writings
| Dimension | Marx’s Writings | Bonger’s Criminality and Economic Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Systematicity | Scattered, occasional comments | Full-length systematic treatise |
| Empirical grounding | Largely absent | Comparative statistical analysis |
| Direct crime focus | Peripheral to broader political economy | Central, sustained focus |
| Publication context | Nineteenth-century political economy | Early twentieth-century criminology |
Conclusion
Willem Bonger’s Criminality and Economic Conditions represents Marxist criminology’s first genuinely systematic theoretical and empirical treatise, translating Marx’s scattered political-economic concepts into a sustained comparative analysis of crime’s relationship to capitalist social organization considerably more developed than anything in Marx’s own corpus. Bonger’s specific contributions, the egoism concept explaining capitalism’s crime-generating psychological effects, the comparative historical method testing these claims against cross-national data, and the early attention to class bias in criminal law’s content and enforcement, anticipated themes that later, more famous Marxist criminologists would develop with greater theoretical sophistication and considerably more advanced empirical methods decades later.
Bonger’s mid-century relative neglect within mainstream criminology, followed by his eventual rediscovery during Marxist criminology’s 1970s revival, illustrates a recurring pattern in this silo’s treatment of conflict theory’s intellectual history: theoretical traditions can experience significant discontinuity in their institutional reception independent of their underlying intellectual merit, a pattern with direct relevance for understanding why Marxist criminology’s contemporary form, examined throughout the remainder of this silo, developed as much through rediscovery and reconstruction as through continuous, unbroken theoretical development from Bonger’s pioneering early twentieth-century foundation.
Related Articles
- Karl Marx and the Conflict Perspective
- Power, Class, and Criminal Law
- Quinney’s Social Reality of Crime
- Conflict Theory and White-Collar Crime
- Criticisms of Conflict Theory
References
- Bonger, W. A. (1969). Criminality and Economic Conditions. Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1916)
- Chambliss, W. J., & Seidman, R. B. (1971). Law, Order, and Power. Addison-Wesley.
- Lombroso, C. (2006). Criminal Man. Duke University Press. (Original work published 1876)
- Quinney, R. (1970). The Social Reality of Crime. Little, Brown.
- Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. University of Chicago Press.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White Collar Crime. Dryden Press.
- Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. Routledge.
- van Bemmelen, J. M. (1960). Willem Adriaan Bonger. In H. Mannheim (Ed.), Pioneers in Criminology (pp. 348–362). Stevens & Sons.
- Vold, G. B. (1958). Theoretical Criminology. Oxford University Press.